Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

Women's history should not be a shallow hunt for heroines.

Your vagina is not a democracy. No one else gets a vote on what you do with it.

Feminism has to fight 'the tyranny of niceness'. It is, and has always been, one of the most potent forces holding women back.

I want to restore the complexity to feminist pioneers. Their legacies might be contested, they might have made terrible strategic choices and they might not have lived up to the ideals they preached. But they mattered. Their difficulty is part of the story.

If feminism doesn't frighten people with power, it is toothless.

Changing the world won't make people like you. It will cause you pain. It will be difficult. It will feel like a struggle. You must accept the size of the mountain ahead of you, and start climbing it anyway.

Being exceptional requires a thousand small selfishnesses, and the world was not ready for women to be that difficult. It is still not ready.

There is no perfect way to make a demand on power. There is no way to do feminism which will protect you from being attacked. You have to be honest with yourself: am I really being unreasonable? Or is the problem with the rest of the world? If it is the latter, then don't be derailed.

It is deeply conservative to suggest that any sufficiently difficult woman from history -- say, one who rebelled against the constraints of femininity by dressing and acting in a masculine way -- must have been a man.

If modern feminism feels toothless, it is because it has retreated into two modes: empty celebration or shadow-boxing with outright bastards. Neither deals with difficulty, and so neither can make a difference.

The average workplace is like fucking Bromancing the Stone.

The suffragettes were easy to condemn, but hard to ignore. Their actions also boosted donations to peaceful, law-abiding suffragist societies. Many of those who claimed to be repelled by the militants were what we would now call "concern trolls" pretending to care about the success of a movement they never supported anyway.

pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.

My grandmother didn’t have the vote, my mother didn’t have the pill, and I don’t have the time.

Perhaps you are thinking: I don't care about sport. Well, neither did I. But now I realise that's partly because sport did not seem to have a place for me.

Women need time and space to play - particularly when we work so hard